Mulholland Drive

On the surface, Hollywood is all glitz and glam—but under that shiny surface lurks a seedy underbelly of betrayals, corruption, lies… sometimes even murder. Here are eight movies that profoundly explore the darker side of Tinseltown.

David Lynch is a director known for many things: dream sequences, surreal visuals, intense noise, and maybe above all, sex. Sex is a large trademark of Lynch and he almost never uses it conventionally. It always has a purpose, and usually, a dark one. From “Blue Velvet” to “Twin Peaks”, these are the scenes that stick with you.

The psychodrama, the whodunit tension and the unknown dangers lurking around every corner can make for some riveting set-ups and shocking finales—especially when those finales leave you hanging by not revealing who the killer was all along.

Sometimes the attraction is there, the characters are crazy about each other and a sex scene just writes itself… and sometimes, we’re left scratching our heads about how two people even end up in the same room together. Here are 10 on-screen hookups that may have caught you off guard.

David Lynch is having a bit of a moment. Yes, it’s outside of the film world, but of course it still has all of Hollywood (and us) intrigued. The surrealist director — whose credits include BLUE VELVET, LOST HIGHWAY, ERASERHEAD and MULHOLLAND DRIVE — has a naughty love for women, organic coffee, quinoa and, not surprisingly, champagne, which led to his collaboration with Dom Pérignon.

Never let it be said that David Lynch takes sex lightly. To quote the man himself: “Certain aspects of sex are troubling — the way it’s used as power, for instance, or the way it takes the form of perversions that exploit other people.” And those “certain aspects” seem to be the only ones that interest Lynch. In his world, no one ever cracks up in bed after an inopportune fart ruins the moment. But no one has glamorized, Hollywood-ized, unrealistic sex either. “Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical,” Lynch said once, “but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.” And by “flat” he either means “more fake than a declaration of true love on THE BACHELOR” or else “specializing in female subjugation, exploitation and masochism.” Whatever the case may be, the kind of sex his characters have — and the kind of sex his movies deal with — are best described as simply Lynchian, a term which has been defined as “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane.” This top 10 list, in chronological order, should help further explain:

We’ve got a great line up on Sundance Channel this month, but one film that we’re really excited to be showing is EYES WIDE SHUT – so excited, in fact, that we’re airing it three times (which, if you’re like me, means you’ll be watching it three times, too). But thinking about EYES WIDE SHUT – Kubrick’s final, posthumously released film – got me thinking about what other movies can possibly compare to Kubrick’s surreal vision of bottled up fantasies that drive the men that obsess over them to the fringes of society’s underground? The story is based on Arthur Snitzler’s 1926 novella, Traumnovelle or “Dream Story,” about a doctor who goes on a two-day psychological bender of mind-alteration that culminates in a masquerade ball, which, like Kubrick’s film, involves that old fashioned combination of masked men and orgies…

David Lynch holds a strange an undeniable power over me. No matter how disturbed his films make me and no matter how little sense they seem to make (even upon subsequent viewing and after consulting so-called Lynch buffs), I will, without hesitation, go and see whatever he lays his creeptastic hands on. And if I lived in Paris you had better believe I would find a way onto the VIP list of Club Silencio, no form of begging would be too low. After all, we’re talking about the man who brought me Agent Dale Cooper, the only detective to inspire a crush so epic I stopped putting sugar in my coffee and learned to love it black. But I’m hardly the only Lynch lover out there, and one such fan has compiled a list of “The Ten Absolute Creepiest Moments in David Lynch’s Oeuvre,” a list only a true fan could make because only a true fan could sit through all the moments that bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe, and watch them again, and again and again.

The Club Silencio scene in David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) is easily my favorite part of the film. The Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying Over You” is eerie and breathtaking, and for a moment I feel as if I actually know what’s going on. That said, it’s probably not the first place I’d look when designing a Parisian night club, but then again I’m not David Lynch.